Intercollegiate Studies Institute Fifty BEST Books of the Century (1)

You can hardly open a periodical without coming across
the statement that what our civilization
needs is more "drive," or dynamism, or self-sacrifice,
or "creativity." In sort of ghastly simplicity
we remove the organ and demand the function. We
make men without chests and expect of them
virtue and enterprise. We laugh at honor and are
shocked to find traitors in our midst. We castrate
and bid the geldings be fruitful.
-C.S. Lewis, The
Abolition of Man

It may not be possible to like Henry Adams, but it is certainly possible
to empathize with him. A grandson and great grandson of Presidents,
the bar was set impossibly high for him at birth. The closest thing
we have to him today is probably Ted Kennedy, and look at what an utter
hash he's made out of his life. The problems of Henry Adams were,
presumably, of a different order, mostly having to do with the feeling
that he could not understand the modern Industrial world, but his general
feeling of having failed to achieve as much as his ancestors likely contributed,
as did the unexpected suicide of his wife.

Meanwhile, he need not have felt this inadequacy so sorely. He
was an accomplished writer : his History of the United States During
the Administrations of Jefferson and Madison (which I've not read)
is considered one of the first great American history texts; Mont-Saint-Michel
and Chartres A Study of Thirteenth Century Unity is still read and
respected; and Democracy (see Orrin's
review) remains one of the best political novels of Washington, DC.
But it is The Education on which his modern reputation rests, and
quite a reputation it is. This third person autobiography was a phenomenal
bestseller when it was published, posthumously, and was named the number
one book on the Modern Library list of 100
Best Nonfiction Books of the 20th Century. That is a record of
accomplishment to rival just about any writer.

As for the book, it's easy to see why it is so highly regarded, particularly
among cultural elites, but it is also badly flawed; and its flaws are by
and large those that made the 20th century one of the bloodiest and most
turbulent in human history. The greatness of the book, besides the
magnificent style, really lies in the degree to which it captures the quandary
of the modern intellectual. Its weakness lies in its utter failure
to address that quandary.

Adams must be one of the few men to ever inhabit three centuries.
Thanks to his family, he was raised as something of an 18th century man.
The bulk of his life was spent in the 19th century, somewhat uncomfortably
thanks to that upbringing. And he lived far enough into the 20th
century to find himself completely baffled. It must be recalled
that while not all of the Founders were Christian, they were at least Deists.
That is they believed that the Universe was a place of order and that it
had been designed by an intelligent being, perhaps not too much different
than ourselves. But during Adams's lifetime men like Lyell, Darwin,
Marx, Freud, and the physicists like Einstein, propounded theories, scientific
or at least cloaked in the guise of science, which taken together denied
the necessity often even the existence of God, and suggested that life
was not an orderly process at all, but rather one of randomness and chance,
governed, if at all, by implacable forces, totally beyond the control of
any being. The generations of modern intellectuals who reveled in
the death of God--tragically and incorrectly perceiving in his demise a
new birth of freedom for mankind--looked up from the corpse and realized
that there was nothing--no set of ideals, no unifying purpose, no laws
of human behavior, no sense of human destiny--to take His place.
If God was truly dead, what was there for Man to have faith in ?

Adams, among the most perceptive and most articulate of the earliest
generation for whom this crisis of faith was the defining feature of existence,
expresses the sense of loss beautifully. In the best known chapter
of the book, The Dynamo and
the Virgin, he takes these two figures as iconic representations of
their times; the Virgin being the symbol which unified Western culture
in the Thirteenth and Fourteenth centuries and led to the great cathedrals
of France, of which he was so enamored, while the dynamo is the symbol
of modernity, and all it ultimately represents is change. I'm not
much of a fan of the Virgin, but even she comes out light years ahead in
this comparison. She at least represents a set of ideas and ideals
and is an accessible and human figure. To the extent that she allowed
men and women of the Middle Ages some entree to Christianity, she served
a worthwhile purpose, and, as the subtitle of Mont-Saint-Michel
states, provided a unity to the society.

The dynamo, representing rapid change, is by definition a disunifying
symbol. It is inhuman. It requires nothing of its worshippers
except the technical know-how to keep it spinning. And, as with all
technology, it is doomed to obsolesence. A society which adopts such
an unstable and meaningless symbol as its new deity must be likewise doomed,
and, sure enough, the Godless, faithless, change-worshipping era upon which
modern man was embarked would prove to be catastrophic for all concerned.

The great tragedy of Henry Adams, and the fatal flaw of the book is
that he embraced the dynamo. This need not have been the case, he
had actually been prepared by his early education to fight it :

The atmosphere of education in which he lived was
colonial, revolutionary, almost Cromwellian, as
though he were steeped, from his greatest grandmotherís
birth, in the odor of political crime.
Resistance to something was the law of New England
nature; the boy looked out on the world with
the instinct of resistance; for numberless generations
his predecessors had viewed the world chiefly
as a thing to be reformed, filled with evil forces
to be abolished, and they saw no reason to suppose
that they had wholly succeeded in the abolition;
the duty was unchanged. That duty implied not
only resistance to evil, but hatred of it. Boys
naturally look on all force as an enemy, and generally
find it so, but the New Englander, whether boy or
man, in his long struggle with a stingy or hostile
universe, had learned also to love the pleasure
of hating; his joys were few.

That this brilliant and capable man, trained for the battle against
evil, whose great grandfather fought for inalienable rights endowed by
a Creator, should have come at the end of his life to the point where he
accepted the dynamo, and the naked force, anarchy and existentialism which
it implied, must diminish him in our eyes. The gist of the book is
that his education was a miseducation, preparing him for a world that had
passed or was passing. In fact, his education prepared him for the
central battle of the modern age, against the loss of faith, but he instead
collaborated with the enemy, and so, did fail in the final analysis to
measure up to his illustrious ancestors.